quote, charles steiner, the watch house where the switches keep

There is a “bad” eternity: the quasi-atemporality of half-inhabited images; of concepts believed; of institutions imposed. There is a “good” eternity unveiled when energy is released, where the Now abides at the very center of the transitory

#imagination #image #critiqueoftheimage #charlessteiner

the reverberation, in spite of its derivative name, has a simple phenomenological nature in the domain of poetic imagination. For it involves bringing about a veritable awakening of poetic creation, even in the soul of the reader, through the reverberation of a single poetic image. By its novelty, a poetic image sets in motion the entire linguistic mechanism. The poetic image places us at the origin of the speaking being.

#gastonbachelard #poeticsofspace #poetics #imagination #image #poeticimage

If, after having fixed before the mind’s eye the primitive form, we ask ourselves the question of knowing how this form comes into being and fills itself with life, we discover a new category—dynamic and vital, a new property of the universe: to reverberate. It is as if a spring found itself inside a closed vessel and its waves, in echoing always anew against the walls of this vessel, filled it with their resonance; or again, it is as if the sound of a hunting horn, sent to all parts by its echo, was causing to quiver, in a common movement, the slightest leaf, the slightest wisp of moss, and was transforming all the forest, filling it up to its edges, into a world sonorous and breathing. The scientist will not fail to object that these are commonplace events relevant to acoustics. For us, however, they are only images, borrowed it is true from the auditory sphere, but destined before all to illustrate, to highlight an essential phenomenon of life, that of reverberation. Without a doubt, the word “reverberate” can be delimited by the acoustic events that it sets, among others, to designate, but this would be the intentional mutilating of it because, in reality, there is a much larger meaning. To restore it is the point of this study. Moreover, as we now discern, behind the elements of sensory nature that compose our images, the actual significance of the phenomenon of reverberation, which, far from depending on those elements, connect them, on the contrary, into a living whole. What is secondary in these images, or, in other words, that which makes these images only images for us, are the resonant spring, the hunting horn, the closed vessel, the echo, the reflection of the sonorous waves against the inner walls, in a word all that appears to the material and palpable world. Let us suppose that these elements come to be missing. Then really will nothing living remain in front of us? For my part, I believe that it is there that we would see the world come to life and fill itself, apart from any instrument, apart from any physical property, with penetrating and deep waves which, in order not to be sonorous in the sensorial sense of the word, will not be any less harmonious, echoic, melodic, susceptible to determine all the tonality of life. And this life itself will reverberate, to the depth of its being, through contact with these waves, sonorous and silent at the same time, will permeate within, will vibrate in unison with them, will live through their life, intermingling with them all the while. This will be the very essence of the phenomenon “to reverberate.”

~translated by Deborah Bouchette. Larger translation can be found here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323675730_Minkowski_Eugene-To_Reverberate_Retentir_translated_by_Deborah_Bouchette_copyright_2018

#reverberate #imagination #image #poetic #eugeneminkowski